Commuter Spy: The third man

Our Man On The Train has his world shattered by an unexpected arrival
on the platform

OK. Something big has happened. It’s like this. The area of the platform parallel to the newspapers is normally the exclusive territory of myself and John, my erstwhile duellist. Every day it’s the same, him with his supersize cup of coffee, me leafing distractedly through the Metro. We stand together, wait together, negotiate the crowds together.

Recently, however, a third man has joined us. Cliff.

Cliff is short, squat, and rather grizzled. He is always unshaven and bleary-eyed, with a South African tinge to his voice – he spent part of his childhood there. He lives, he says, in a village several miles out of town, and works in some esoteric layer of NHS middle management in London. He has just started in a new position, and says he will be getting the same train as John and me from now on.

“Nah, man,” he says to us on the first morning. “I never carry a bag. I don’t need the hassle – I leave all my stuff at work.” John and I later agree that a commuter without a bag is like a snail without a shell. But Cliff is made of sterner stuff. Every morning he reads the paper for a few minutes, drinks his coffee, then falls asleep. That’s all a man needs, says Cliff. Paper. Coffee. Sleep.

“The worst part of my commute isn’t the train, anyway,” he says. “It’s getting to the station.”

“The country roads are really dodgy first thing in the morning,” he says. “Especially in the winter when it’s dark. You can get up some speed, but you never know when a tractor’s going to pull out without looking. They never expect to see you coming.”

A few days earlier, he says, he was rounding a bend when a bird flew into his face, shattering his visor. He couldn’t see a thing, but managed to regain control of his bike and steer to the side of the road. His helmet was ruined, and he was covered in blood – luckily, belonging to the bird, not him.

“It was fine,” he says, cheerily. “I cleaned the blood off and carried on to work. I wasn’t even late.”

When we board the train, John and I exchange uncertain glances. Life, we realise, has changed forever.